They look depressing and I hate being around them. A city should be a nice place to live, not a playground for architects’ experiments
Comment on Anon's brother hates concrete
huginn@feddit.it 5 months agoTo you.
The peak of brutality architecture beats any other type in my eyes. It’s beautiful in a way no other building or style compares.
onion@feddit.de 5 months ago
huginn@feddit.it 5 months ago
I love being around them. Visiting Tokyo right now and there are so many gorgeous concrete buildings.
The last thing I’d want is to live in a city that was so stuck in the past that all buildings look 100 years old.
Give me buildings from the 2020s not the 1920s. Give me sleek and light concrete, metal and glass.
Death to brick and wrought iron.
WeirdGoesPro@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
Huh…my preferences are literally the opposite of yours. History FTW!
PyroNeurosis@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 months ago
Damn. I rather like the interwar style of architecture: pretty lines and compelling nuances and decorations. Something to distract myself with as opposed to brutalist architecture.
huginn@feddit.it 5 months ago
Brutalism is beautiful in its simplicity and honesty. Combine that with some green and it’s a 10/10 to me.
Give me a verdant bunker any day.
tetris11@lemmy.ml 5 months ago
A city should be a place for people to live, not some artsy space for real-estate developers to inflate living costs.
Have your arts architecture projects, but also have functional buildings too please
Jesus_666@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Unfortunately many brutalistic buildings are far off from its peak and just look like lazily designed gray blobs. High-effort brutalism can look good (or can look inappropriately evil but that’s besides the point); low-effort brutalism always looks cheap.
exocrinous@startrek.website 5 months ago
Low effort brutalism looks cheap because it is. And that’s a good thing. In my country there’s a homeless crisis. The waitlist for government housing is five years. And that’s because too much of the government housing is single family detached houses. The politicians always say “we don’t have enough money to build government housing for everyone who needs it”. You know how many homeless we’d have if the government built soviet block style apartment buildings? Next to none. The people who can live on their own and just don’t have enough money can live in that, the people who need support can stay in the homeless shelters that have support, and only the people who want to be homeless would be left. Brutalism is efficient. American style suburbia is inefficient, so much so that it needs to be subsidized by the government using money taken from the city, because the suburbanites can’t pay for their own single family detached houses, even the ones with high paying jobs.
GregorGizeh@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
I completely agree, except with the suggestion that apartment blocks must be brutalist to be space efficient. It wouldn’t be very difficult to make apartment blocks which dont look depressingly gray and blocky. Its just the cheapest thing to do, but in my opinion even (or especially) the lower class deserves to live in homely conditions too.
exocrinous@startrek.website 5 months ago
Well I may be biased because I think brutalist architecture is beautiful, but I disagree. Every penny saved on the appearance of the building is a penny towards the functionality of the building, or towards housing more people. Would I rather have a pretty brick facade or 1% better thermal and sonic insulation? I’ll pick the insulation. Would I rather have a visually interesting architectural shape or rooftop solar? I’ll pick the solar. Visual appearance has never been a factor in my living needs, ugly wallpaper aside. I don’t really understand the mindset of that stuff being important. I’ll pick a nice colour for my bedsheets, and that’s as far as it goes. And besides, elegance of form and function is a beauty all its own. I recently got a new mouse and it’s beautiful to me because it works well. It has a pleasing heft, comfortable shape, no waste, and that’s beautiful. A mouse in the most pleasing colour, but with poor ergonomics, would be ugly to me. Single family detached houses are hideous to me.
huginn@feddit.it 5 months ago
Cheap brutalism can look good.
DogWater@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Can you share examples of good and bad brutality buildings that are cheap? I’m just curious what you like
huginn@feddit.it 5 months ago
Yes but I’m currently traveling and have very limited Internet access… I’ll try and remember to do this in a couple weeks when I’m back into good connectivity.
Plus being home will let me pull out my Big Book of Brutalism to reference.
gmtom@lemmy.world 5 months ago
For good brutalised, look at the Barbican or Habitat 67